Companies are ordering staff to lean on AI, then handing the credit to the machine. Researchers call it the AI penalty, and workers say it is costing them promotions and raises.
Aubrey spent more than a year on a project to speed up a costly medical manufacturing process. When she finished, her manager asked her to present it to senior leadership as if Claude, the AI chatbot, had done the work. She compromised, talking up the bot while making clear she had carried the load.
Her manager cut in anyway and told the room she had built the whole thing in a minute with AI. Weeks later her annual review came back lukewarm, and her boss admitted the moment had counted against her.
She is not alone, as Business Insider’s Shubham Agarwal reports. Deepak, an IT developer at a Fortune 500 firm in India, began openly crediting the coding agents he used, in the name of transparency. Before long his managers assumed all his good work was the machine’s, and he thinks it stalled a promotion.
Many white-collar workers are now caught between bosses who demand more AI and bosses who dock its users. So they have started hiding how much they lean on it.
